I just found a video I thought the people of Nintendolife would be interested in, and thought I would share. This definitely opens my eyes a bit on the Metroid franchise, and clears off some of the rose-tint on my nostalgia glasses. I personally think the Morph Ball is still cool, but I can't think of a good reason why Samus would use it as opposed to just crouching or going prone like any other first person game. I guess it's more fun, but it's still kind of silly to think about. Skip to 1:11 to avoid the opening.

Ya, there's kind of more to the ball than 'just getting around'. I could understand crawling for exploration and maybe ducking occasionally during power beam combat, but they do build the game around the ball for the most part, so that you don't have the need to crawl. Samus would be prone if she crawled, and that's not her style maybe. I think we should be more concered with melee attacks with the arm canon to the face followed by a charge blast.

Why did people think it was magic in the first place? I had always assumed that she was just a contortionist.

While Samus could logically just get down and crawl, perhaps she couldn't actually crawl on her stomach in that big suit, thus requiring the morphball. Or, even if she could, that would still give her a really hard time to go both horizontally and vertically through narrow passageways.

Honestly, her turning into a ball isn't as ridiculous as that video was.

Also, I think it's an insult to call the developers lazy for not doing something that was technically impossible at the time. This was back in the Super Mario Bros. 1 days, where you had to fit all of the available sprites into a small table, or area. There simply would not have been enough room for them to put in graphics of her crawling on her stomach as well as all of the other sprites. Maybe in post 1990 era NES they could've done it, as later NES games were able to use sprites that were in different tables (like Super Mario Bros. 3), but like I said, this game was from a different era.

This here is where all of the graphics for Samus was stored. Do you see enough room to add in sprites of Samus crawling? Very rude on "game theory"s part.

It seems to me that it was very clever of the developers to create the Morph Ball, not lazy. They had graphical issues to overcome, so they just creatively found a solution. Plus, the Morph Ball is a pretty cool ability.

Aran's Power Suit technology remains a mystery, especially the curious Morph Ball function. All attempts at duplicating it have ended in disaster; four test subjects were horribly broken when they engaged our Morph Ball prototypes. Science Team wisely decided to move on afterward.

You see, not just anyone can harness its power.

I foresee what you'll do there.
-The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is. ~Winston Churchill

but I can't think of a good reason why Samus would use it as opposed to just crouching or going prone like any other first person game.

How would she be able to stick to magnetic surfaces, go thorough small holes/cracks in walls, speed-boost to go up ramps or fit in a cannon?

A better question you should be asking is; why are those features there in the first place? You never see chozo or space pirates or galactic federation troopers rolling up into a ball and the game goes out of it's way to say why only Samus can do this. So why are there features among the chozo ruins, pirate bases, and GF ships that can only be navigated by using a morph ball? By including them in addition to these features, Retro basically admitted that all of these things were made specifically for Samus and that no one else matters in the Metroid universe.

Instead of a magnetic strip, wouldn't it make more sense for the space pirates to have built a ladder instead?

Who cares if she could fit into those spaces just by crawling? Rolling is obviously faster!

You also can't use a gun while rolling, and the morph bombs are just about the most useless land mines ever conceived. Maybe if you had to detonate them manually they would be more useful, or heck, they'd be more useful if Samus could throw them rather than place them on the ground.

I think that this is called "over-complicating." If everything in video games were perfectly realistic and practical, they wouldn't be very much fun to play. For example, how come all those guys in FPSs can take out numerous enemy units and come out completely fine? Many times, they don't even have proper cover, and they can survive multiple hits from enemy weapons. Over-thinking certain game elements can kill the fun.